by Barbara Vine
Although I didn't know it at the time, Vera was right and vera is the feminine form of the Latin ‘true’. Perhaps it is Russian too and they were both correct or else Chad, in this as in other matters, was not the infallible authority Francis at that time claimed him to be.
Vera looked at Francis. ‘My own son,’ she said. She sounded almost proud. It was as if she were fascinated by the possibilities of how far Francis might go. ‘If I had spoken to my mother like that my father would have killed me,’
‘Fortunately my father is in North Africa.’
‘You're not supposed to know that! You're not supposed to say!’
‘Careless talk costs lives,’ said Francis. ‘Of course this room is full of people who can't wait to get out of here and tell the Germans Major Gerald Hillyard, the mainstay of British Intelligence, is currently at the gates of Tobruk, making history.’ He turned to Chad. ‘My parents have a code that's defied even the censors. Exclamation mark for Egypt, inverted commas for Tripoli, colon for Far East et cetera…’
‘Francis,’ said Vera, her voice shaking.
‘The last communication was laden with dialogue. Quod erat demonstrandum. Heaven knows what they will do if our armed forces ever reach the point of actually invading Europe. They haven't arranged for that. It doesn't show…’
Vera jumped up, covered her face with her hands and ran out of the room.
‘…much optimism, does it? Not what you'd call much faith or vera.’
Most grown-ups I knew would have reprimanded Francis for his behaviour to his mother. Chad did not. He merely shrugged. It was his way to give enormous shrugs, rather Gallic, though he was as English as they possibly come, as English as his name.
‘I was conceived in Chadwell Heath,’ was how he explained it – explained it in fact to me that evening under pressure from Francis. The truth was that it was a name which had been in his family since it was given to his grandfather at the time the Victorians revived medieval Christian names. Vera, I was later to learn, had considerable respect for Chad's family who were minor local gentry, Masters of Foxhounds and with plaques on the church walls at Sissington, commemorating sons fallen in the Great War. How he came to have his tin-pot job on the Sissington and Upper Stour Speaker is another story. For war service he was apparently unfit, having had rheumatic fever as a child. Eden he had first seen in the magistrates' court in Colchester where she had come with notes for her boss and he had been in the press box. Of course (this was all Vera's story), they had later been properly introduced by some suitable person, a Chatteriss probably.
Vera came back into the room pink-eyed and tight-lipped to find Chad having a look at Mrs Marshall which I had forgotten to put away and saying that what he particularly fancied at that moment was Little Salpicons of Salmon à la Chevalier. Francis timed his remark to his mother's arrival and said that I had got it from my grandmother who was a cook.
‘Her great-aunt, not her grandmother,’ said Vera as if the collateral relationship improved things.
Chad sounded interested only, not in the least repelled. ‘You never told me you had an aunt in service round here. Who was she with?’
Vera nearly screamed, she was in such a state. ‘She wasn't my aunt! She wasn't anything to do with us! She was Faith's mother's aunt or something like that, something on Faith's side.’
The devil entered into me and I told him how she had cooked dinner for Edward the Eighth.
‘And Mrs Simpson?’
I said I didn't know.
‘Why do we have to talk about cooks? It's ridiculous anyway reading a cookery book these days, it's enough to make you ill. Personally, I should think it's time that wretched book went the way of your great-aunt or whatever she was, Faith.’
Francis, who had been reading Saki, said, ‘She was a good cook as good cooks go and as good cooks go she went.’
He was rewarded by congratulatory laughter from Chad and a glare from his mother. For a moment or two he sat in one of his mystifying silences, not exactly smiling but looking immensely pleased with himself without smiling, and then he got up and said he was going to bed. Vera was thus foiled and had to take her frustration out on me, asking me as a preliminary if I knew what time it was, and then proceeding as if twenty-five minutes to nine was the small hours. I went upstairs and consoled myself by daubing my face with Miner's Liquid Make-up and Tangee lipstick. Chad soon went home. I heard Vera go out into the kitchen to wash the glasses before settling down with the Daily Telegraph crossword.
Family connections Vera was proud of were the Chatterisses who had everything to recommend them as relatives. She always spoke of Helen as ‘my sister’, never ‘my half-sister’, and Helen's husband as ‘my brother-in-law, the General’. They lived at Walbrooks where Helen had been brought up and which she inherited when her grandparents died. It was there, of course, in the days when the old Richardsons were still alive, that Vera had performed her spectacular rescue of Eden from under the tree in the storm.
I was told by Vera that I must call them Uncle Victor and Auntie Helen just as I called her Auntie Vera, though Eden was always just Eden. Vera was very anxious, before that first visit, that I should behave well. The following year I was adjured, on pain of ‘never being taken anywhere again’, not to breathe a word to Helen about the cookery book. That first time I minded my manners and did what Vera said, only to have Helen repudiate ‘auntie’. She said it was vulgar, which made Vera sit up a bit.
‘Not “auntie”, darling, I beg.’ Helen talked, and still talks, with all the panoply of twenties slang and terminology and Mitford girls expressions. ‘It makes me feel like someone's old charwoman with corns and false teeth and whalebone corsets.’
This was so much an antithesis of what she was that I stared.
‘You call me Helen and him Victor and if you can't bring yourself to do that, call him ‘General’. I always do, it sounds so grand and Victorian.’
She did, too. ‘General, darling’, as often as not. Like some lace-winged creature caught in amber, she remained for ever trapped in the twenties – more than that, in a hill station in the twenties, her frocks waistless and diaphanous, a pith helmet planted on her crimped golden hair whenever the sun shone. She smoked black Russian cigarettes – heaven knows where she got them in 1941 in a carved ivory cigarette holder. Her daughter was in the W A A F, her son a fighter pilot, and she and the General were alone in that big house where the Richardsons had created a library, a music room, and outside a ha-ha, a gazebo and a shrubbery of exotics that battled on through the East Anglian winters. Two old women, one from Stoke Tye and one from Thorington Street, daily cycled over to wait on them. I believe the General did the cooking while Helen, in memsahib gear, swanned about the garden picking flowers and making magnificent arrangements all over the house of dahlias and astilbe and silver-mauve hosta.
I liked her very much. It is a long time now since that liking became love. She was very unlike Vera, being easy-going, light-hearted, easily amused, generous. All those things she still is. For a long while, until his détente with Jamie, she was the only member of our family with whom Francis continued to keep in touch. With her he seems to have had a special affinity and it wasn't hard to see why. Of course Helen was nice and there was no humbug about her, but he and she had something else in common that specially endeared her to him. They had both been abandoned – ‘discarded’ was the word Francis used – by a parent when they were children, Francis's mother having sent him off to boarding-school in order to devote her time to her sister, Helen's father sending her off to her grandparents and not having her back again even when he had a new wife and home… I am not sure what Daniel Stewart means when he says ‘the separation still rankles’ with Helen. The story of how Arthur Longley had brought his bride Ivy to the school gates to be shown to Helen was well-known in our family and Helen used to tell it with no apparent resentment.
‘Grandpapa and Grandmamma were such perfect angels,’ she said, ‘that going t
o live with them was utter bliss. What sometimes terrified me was that my father would take me back and that I couldn't have borne. Do you know the first thing Grandmamma did when I first came to them, the very first evening? She brought me these two Siamese kittens in a basket and said their mamma had died too and they would be so unhappy if they couldn't sleep on my bed.’
The next time I called Vera ‘auntie’, she said in an embarrassed way that ‘aunt’ might sound better. Would I try to get into the way of calling her ‘Aunt Vera’ as ‘auntie’ was rather vulgar. My first successful effort was overheard by Francis and it filled him with glee. He proceeded to drop the ‘ie’ or similar sounding suffix off every word that ended like that, ultimately driving Vera into hysterics.
At breakfast: ‘Thank you ver much. I don't want an more coff. No postal deliver today? How absolute craze’, and so on.
She was rubbing her hands together. ‘Why are you doing this? Why do you torment me?’
‘Avoid vulgarit at an price.’
The result was that I stopped calling Vera anything at all.
On a visit to Stoke I overheard her telling Helen she would have liked another child. When I say ‘overheard’, I don't mean I was listening outside a door or behind a curtain – though I dare say I was capable of this – but that although they knew I was present, Vera probably thought me too stupid to understand and Helen didn't care. Or they believed me just out of earshot if they kept their voices low. It was rather what I suppose the attitude of a Victorian pair of lovers must have been to the duenna planted in the same large room with them.
This was before my mother had told me the story of the lost child, Kathleen March, and before I had heard of the adolescent Vera's devotion to her baby sister. It surprised me to hear that Vera was fond of children and liked babies. Was this why she had invited me, who was still a child? Did she love me really and was somehow incapable of showing it?
‘You know how I love children,’ she said to Helen.
If Helen was sceptical she was too kind to show it.
‘Why don't you have another one, darling? You're young still, you're only a baby yourself. Why, you're aeons younger than poor old me, you might be my daughter.’
To me it seemed incredible. Vera was thirty-four, with faded hair and a stringy neck. She was middle-aged.
‘There is the little matter of Gerry being goodness knows where.’
‘The war won't go on for ever, darling.’
‘Won't it?’ Vera said bitterly.
‘You're missing Eden, too, aren't you?’
Vera was silent for a moment. She had developed a strange nervous habit that I think was unconscious. I have never seen anyone else do it. Standing or sitting, she would clasp her hands tightly and lean forward bearing on those clasped hands as if in acute pain or as if trying to exert great pressure on something. The nearest I can get to it is to say it was like someone stuffing a swollen cork into a bottle with a narrow neck. It lasted a second or two and then she relaxed. She did this now while Helen watched her with sympathetic curiosity. Then she said:
‘Eden will never come back.’
‘Darling, of course she will! What can you mean?’
‘Not that. Her life's hardly in danger being a wireless telegraphist in Portsmouth. I mean she'll never come home again to live with me. This is the breakaway, isn't it? When the war's over she won't want to come back to Sindon, she'll want to live on her own.’
‘By the time the war's over,’ said Helen, ‘Eden will be married.’
‘There you are then. It amounts to the same thing.’
But she was wrong, for Eden did come back and so did Uncle Gerald and before the end of the seemingly endless war.
In the meantime, though, life went on much the same at Laurel Cottage. Francis and I were reprimanded for eating with our right hands, hunted down at bedtime – I successfully as often as not, he nearly always escaping – admonished for falling below the standard of gentlefolk; daily the crossword was done, weekly a letter was written to Uncle Gerald and rather more often than that to Eden. Was Vera worried because weeks, months, had passed since she had last heard from her husband? Women knew they must expect these silences. A week before I was due to leave for home and go back to school a letter came.
Her relief at its arrival was plain to see. But she did not seem to want to read it. After breakfast, she took the letter upstairs and shut herself up in her bedroom with it. Francis liked shocking me and in those days he always succeeded. He said:
‘I read in a book that couples fuck more in the first two years of marriage than in all the rest of their lives. What do you think?’
‘I don't know,’ I said, going red.
‘You're blushing again. I wish I could do that. So innocent and charming. You will have to teach me sometime.’
For the last few days of my stay, Francis went off to visit friends. He had everything his own way, he did just as he liked, and when Vera asked him who these people were and where they lived, he refused to tell her. She threatened to withhold his train fare but Francis didn't care about that. He always had money. I don't know where it came from. Teenagers in those days didn't take on menial tasks to earn money, at least middle-class teenagers didn't, and Francis doing a paper round was in any case unimaginable. But he said he earned it, smiling enigmatically, and when asked by doing what, replied, ‘Oh, this and that.’ The day before he went, he carried out the most ambitious Vera-tease he had ever attempted.
In one of her letters, Eden had mentioned a naval officer, a Commander Michael Franklin. He was her boss or commanding officer or someone in authority over her, and had praised her. This, apparently, was in fact all it amounted to. But Eden, being Eden and a Longley, had also mentioned that Franklin was an Honourable, the son of Lord Somebody or other. Anyway, Vera had been very impressed, and had talked about Franklin to the Morrells and the Chatterisses and anyone else who would listen, managing to give the impression that Eden's connection with him was something more than that of clerk and boss, in fact was romantic. I think she persuaded herself it was. Chad Hamner wasn't spared this either, even though he seemed to be regarded – particularly by Francis – as Eden's accredited boyfriend.
One evening the phone rang. This was itself unusual. It was bound to be Helen, Vera said to me, going to answer it. We were alone, making a joint onslaught on the crossword, perhaps the only common ground we had, while the clock approached the witching hour of eight. I couldn't hear what Vera was saying. Triumphant at finding the answer to a clue before she had, I was writing in ‘Manning’ for ‘Cardinal deployment of work force’ when she came rushing back, all excitement.
‘Who do you think that was?’
Vera was always asking this and being scathing if one guessed wrong.
Of course I said I didn't know.
‘Commander the Honourable Michael Franklin, RN.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘That man Eden works for?’
This wasn't the way Vera would have chosen to put it.
‘I don't think it's necessary to use those terms, is it? “Works for”? “Works with” might be more appropriate, or even “friend”.’ She became heavily sarcastic. ‘Yes, I don't think we should be going too far if we said “friend”, Faith. On our side of the family we may not quite aspire to relatives who cooked for the Duke of Windsor but we do know some nice people we can call our friends, some well-bred people with nice backgrounds. I think we can say we do.’
She was extremely excited, something which always let loose her aggression. She gripped her left hand in her right hand and bore down, contorting her face. I asked her what he wanted.
‘To come here and see us. Well, to see me, if the truth is told. I don't suppose he aspires to see you or my son. It's me he wants to see as Eden's sister. Those were his words. He has to go to Ipswich on something very confidential and hush-hush and might he call and see Eden's sister?’
It would be at lunchtime on the following Wednesday. He didn'
t want lunch, didn't expect it in these hard times, rather not, he would have a sandwich somewhere, but nevertheless it would be at lunchtime he would call. Oh, Francis was very clever, very subtle – he knew his mother. She invited the Chatterisses, the Morrells and, oddly, Chad Hamner. Chad was Eden's boyfriend but just the same she invited him to meet the man she hoped would be his supplanter, and hoped it on no grounds but that Franklin was the son and heir to a viscount. (Vera had found this out at the public library.) And Chad a scion of a no longer very gentle or landed house. She was not a very nice woman and some might say she deserved all she got but she was pathetic – oh, she was pathetic in her aspirations and her downfall!
They all accepted. There was no meat around to speak of and all our combined rations would be too meagre to feed nine people. Vera got hold of two rabbits, not wild ones but the kind you keep in hutches. These were Old English, the white sort with brown blotches, and Anne and I had gathered sow thistles and chickweed to feed them. When I protested, Vera told me not to be a sentimental fool. She roasted the rabbits and did roast potatoes to go with them and carrots cooked in cider, and runner beans, with blackberry pie and summer pudding to follow. I picked the blackberries. The vegetables she had grown herself in the beds which had once been Grandmother Longley's rose garden.
Of course Franklin didn't come. By that time, as we later discovered, he was on the high seas protecting a north Russian convoy, his vessel destined to be among the thousands of tons of British shipping lost in the following year and he with it. General Chatteriss, drinking the sherry which Chad had again produced from somewhere, kept looking at his watch and remarking from one till ten past:
‘Feller's late.’
And from ten past till the half-hour:
‘Feller's not comin'.’
Chad knew it was Francis's doing. Not all the time, I think, but only from mid-way through this miserable drinking session in which the Dry Fly was soon exhausted and Vera was in a pitiable state wondering what to give Franklin when he did come.
